Here it is: Our Top 10 games of 2011. It’s been an amazing year for mobile games and technology, and these 10 games represent what we think are the most fun you can have on an iPhone or iPad in 2011. Tell us your year-end favorites in the comments section, and get ready for a spectacular 2012!

#10: Mage Gauntlet

Mage Gauntlet is Rocketcat Games’ most ambitious title yet, and all that effort paid off magnificently. Infused with the developer’s delightful humor and pixel-perfect 16-bit art, Mage Gauntlet gives you a satisfying array of attacks and puts you up against hordes of enemies. Before long you’ll be performing a dance of death, slaughtering baddies with every step as you make your way through the levels. The game has tons of content and lots of replay value, making it one of the year’s best for anyone with an iOS device.

Our Bottom Line: If you fondly remember the days of 16-bit action RPGs, then it doesn’t get much better than Mage Gauntlet. In fact, gaming doesn’t get much better.

Firemint’s cartoonish sneaking game Spy Mouse is so full of content that it could easily be released for another system for $40 and no one would complain. You play as a hungry mouse who wants nothing more than to grab a cheese dinner without being caught by patrolling cats. The controls are intuitive, the levels are varied, and the boss battles are epic. Best of all, the game appeals to players of all ages, so everyone in your family can enjoy it.

Our Bottom Line: Spy Mouse offers just about everything we look for in an iOS game.

In a year full of freemium iOS games, only a handful broke new ground. Tiny Tower, a sim game from Pocket Frogs developer NimbleBit, was easily the best. One look at this tiny, pixel-art world of coffee shops, restaurants, and Mapple Stores, and we were hooked. Tiny Tower has added even more gameplay features since it launched, making it the most addictive social sandbox since FarmVille.

A perfect storm of indie art cred led three Toronto-based artists (game developers Capy Games, musician Jim Guthrie, and digital artist Superbrothers) to create this iOS masterpiece. Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP is the haunting adventure of a warrior known as the Scythian, who uncovers an ancient book called the Megatome. Even though it’s a short game, Sworcery is memorable for its fantastic art style and minimalist presentation. We’re hoping this is more than just a one-off project, because we can’t wait to revisit the world of Sworcery.

Our Bottom Line: Sword and Sworcery has some of the most amazing visuals and music of any iPad game, but the gameplay leaves something to be desired.

One of the year’s most successful new games was bird-based, but it wasn’t Angry Birds or one of its many spin-offs. Tiny Wings, a timing-based flying game, inspired scores of imitators due to its simple (but instantly understandable) controls. By pressing on the screen, you could send your bird diving into wave-like hills, soaring through the levels if you got into the right groove. But Tiny Wings’ real lasting legacy might be the achievements that unlock score multiplies– a feature we’ve seen in dozens of games since.

Our Bottom Line: Tiny Wings is brilliant in its simplicity, originality, and ability to keep you coming back again and again.

We’re big fans of cover-based shooters, but until Epoch hit the App Store, no truly great ones had come out on iOS. Epoch takes the idea of the cover-based shooter and re-engineers it to work on a touchscreen. The result is an intense, acrobatic, reflex-testing game that’s almost as fun to watch as it is to play. But what gives the game legs is the deep leveling and inventory system you can play with between levels. It doesn’t hurt that the game is eye-poppingly gorgeous, either.

Our Bottom Line: A terrific and amazing-looking action game with perfect slide-based controls and exceptional action.

Last year, our favorite physics puzzler was Cut The Rope, but Where’s My Water? is just as fun. In this game, you have to connect the alligator Swampy with a supply of clean water so he can take a bath. By dragging your finger on the screen, you can dig trenches for the water to flow through. Start adding explosive and corrosive chemicals, switches, platforms, and steam, and you’ve got an endless amount of potential puzzles. We can’t wait to see what Swampy’s planning for next year.

We didn’t know what to expect when EA announced they were bringing the popular horror franchise Dead Space to iOS. What they delivered was a dark, beautiful, and truly scary shooter that lived up to the game’s console counterparts. Dead Space has everything we look for in a serious shooter, with an incredible atmosphere of darkness and psychological terror layered on top of it. You can’t go wrong with Dead Space. Just be sure to play it in the dark.

Our Bottom Line: Dead Space for iOS is just about everything we’d hoped it would be: action-packed, scary, challenging, and a total blast.

Rockstar’s iOS port of the 2001 open-world crime game Grand Theft Auto 3 is so good, we considered giving them Game of the Year honors once again (last year, they won it for GTA: Chinatown Wars). It’s hard to match carjacking and rampaging in Liberty City, and all of a sudden, Gameloft’s Gangstar series won’t cut it. While GTA 3 is still a blast, and it looks great on the latest iOS hardware, we’ve played it all before, which is why it took the runner-up spot this year.

Our Bottom Line: Grand Theft Auto III on iPhone is an incredible achievement; it’s a game every serious gamer should play.

Like other iOS gamers, we were expecting big things from Chair with Infinity Blade II. Not only did they meet our expectations, but they exceeded them in almost every way by releasing one of the biggest, best-looking, deepest gaming experiences we’ve seen on iOS yet. The environments are more expansive, the fighting has been refined to near perfection, and the graphics look better than anything else on the platform. If you only buy one iOS game this year, make it Infinity Blade II.

Our Bottom Line: Infinity Blade II takes everything that was great about the first game and turns it up a notch.

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Latest Recommended Games

The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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